In this chapter, as I explicate the methodology used in the current study, I begin by discussing trends in research studies conducted on homosexual/LGBT issues, especially within the Indian context, and describe the methodological frameworks used in these studies. Every kind of research inquiry is situated/contextual—these are contexts of theory, practice, beliefs, values, professional training, disciplinary parameters, and personal experience. I take an example of two kinds of studies, under the broad stream of medicalization of homosexuality, to discuss this issue further. I then discuss in detail the life course theory as informing the methodology of this study and also a critical psychosocial approach that has shaped the conceptualization and analysis of this work. Following this I discuss my own location in carrying out this study and give a brief description of the research questions that the study sought to answer. I also discuss the context of the research participants and the site/cities where interviews were conducted and process of the same. I conclude this chapter by discussing issues related to research ethics.
2.1 Studies on Lesbian, Gay Lives, and Identity Development: How Have These Been Done?
Sexual orientation as an identity category emerged from the medical model of homosexuality in the late 1800s. Since then several descriptions of the ‘pervert’, ‘inert’ homosexual, and the biological and psychological differences between homosexual and heterosexual males appear in medical literature, along with several experiments on treating of the homosexual (See Bieber 1962; Haldeman 1994; Silverstein 1991, 1996). The Kinsey study and subsequent reports in 1948 and 1953 were a major departure from the studies that viewed homosexuality as a perversion. Kinsey merely studied sexual behaviours of men and women using a survey method with 10,000 men and women and concluded that about 37% of post-pubertal men and 20% of post-pubertal women had same-sex sexual experiences, and that 13% of men and 7% of women had had more same-sex sexual experiences than cross-sex ones. Later, with declassification of homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses in the DSM, studies focused on lesbian, gay models of identity development (see Cass 1979; Troiden 1979), lesbian, gay health and mental health (see Remafedi 1987; D’Augelli and Hershberger 1993; Garnets et al. 1990) have been conducted, mostly within the disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, and public health, and have mostly come from the American context and are more often based on the experiences of white, American gay men.
In the Indian context, academic research on LGBT lives (covering gay, bisexual men and trans women) has been initiated in the context of HIV/AIDS and is strongly influenced by positivist, quantitative research paradigms shaped within the public health epidemiological research tradition. Most of this is behavioural research and is motivated by public health concepts of disease prevention and developing evidence-based interventions. Monitoring and evaluation of research that is aimed at developing effective programs and making policy recommendations for the health and well-being of MSM, gay, bisexual men and trans women is common (see Thomas et al. 2009; Humsafar Trust 2002; Dandona et al. 2005; Joint United Nations Program 2010). There exists some research that focuses on mental health, specifically depression and suicide among MSM, gay men, and the context of stigma, HIV, negative life events, and violence (see Chakrapani et al. 2014; Sivasubramanian et al. 2011; Tomori et al. 2016). These studies, too, have employed quantitative methodologies to answer questions of risk and vulnerability to mental health problems.
There has also been research focused on the socio-historical context of same-sex desire in India (see Vanita and Kidwai 2000). There are ethnographic studies focusing on sub-cultures, language, rituals of local identities such as the hijras, arvanis, kothis (see Nanda 1994; Reddy 2006; Mahalingam 2003). Very little research that discusses lives of lesbian, bisexual women exists, and most of this research has been exploratory and has often employed qualitative research methods to study lived experiences of violence, stigma, and discrimination associated with being lesbian/bisexual, queer (see Fernandez and Gomathy 2003; Ghosh et al. 2011; CREA 2012; Biswas et al. 2016). Similarly research, with persons whose gender identity and expressions do not fall within the binary of men and women, as well as research with trans masculine persons, is only beginning to emerge (Shah et al. 2015; Biswas et al. 2016). In addition, there is a lot of documentation, by NGOs and human rights groups, that includes narratives of LGBTQ lived realities. There are also biographical accounts and anthologies of gay men, lesbian women, as well as trans persons. Thus, there are a range of academic, NGO reports, research studies, and fiction and non-fiction writing, depicting lives of LGBTQ persons in India.
In the context of the methodology of research in the area of sexual orientation, Hammack (2005) suggests that there has been a philosophical schism in sexual orientation research, with divergent—rather, discordant—conceptualizations of sexual orientation. These include two main strands that dominate research in this area: essentialism and constructionism. For an essentialist, sexuality is an intrinsic, internal, characteristic of an individual that transcends history, culture, and society. So, sexual orientation is seen as a universal, ahistorical, context-free, trait of an individual. On the other hand, for the constructivist, sexual orientations are ‘products of particular historical and cultural understandings rather than being universal and immutable categories of human experience’ (Bohan 1996, xvi; cited in Hammack 2005, 270). Thus sexual orientation is seen as a system developed by human beings to make sense of sexual desire and this system is responsive to and constituted by socio-political, cultural, and historical contexts. This intellectual division of perspectives seems irreconcilable and, as Hammack (2005) suggests, ‘the validity of each philosophical approach does not rest on empirical discovery, as data can substantiate both positions’ (274). In other words, there exists data that supports both a biological-essentialist position of origin of sexual orientation as well as a social constructivist one. Thus, it is possible to collect data to support either or both of the positions. This situation points to several serious methodological problems of ontology as well as epistemology. Some of these are: comparability of research findings, fragmentation of knowledge, as well as one of the issues that I wish to raise and discuss here further—the political nature of research itself. In order to discuss, the situated/contextual and political nature of research and the endeavour of knowledge building, especially with a subject such as homosexuality, I would like to cite examples of two kinds of research studies that would fall under the broad stream of medicalization of homosexuality.
Historically, medical science, particularly psychiatry and allied mental health sciences, such as psychology, have viewed homosexuality as an abnormality and a perversion. This view has led to several assumptions about homosexuality that have guided medical research on the subject. One of these assumptions is that there are properties intrinsic to homosexuals that make homosexuality a pathological condition. This assumption is often seen to be underlying research studies aimed at looking for differences between the ‘normal’ heterosexual and the ‘pervert’ homosexual. Studies comparing brain structures of homosexuals and heterosexuals, genital and hormonal make-up, personality structures and other psychological traits, are examples of studies motivated by the belief in a basic (read biological/structural and psychological) ‘difference’ between the normal and the ab-normal (see Krafft-Ebing 1922; Mantegazza 1932; Kolodny et al. 1971; Freud 1955). A related belief is that homosexuality is caused by faulty learning or is a result of arrested development. Studies looking for a ‘cause’ for homosexuality, studying childhoods of adult homosexuals and looking for traumatic early sexual experiences, inadequate parenting, cold and distant fathers and over-involved, enmeshed mothers, that led to the child becoming homosexual are examples of studies (see Bieber 1962; Freud 1955) situated within the belief that adult homosexuality is a result of unresolved traumatic childhoods. The other side of this includes studies that are located within the belief that homosexuality is as normal as heterosexuality. Some studies, such as the one conducted by Hooker (1957), assert that homosexuality is a normal form of sexuality. In her study, Hooker administered three projective tests to 30 homosexual men and 30 heterosexual men and asked experts (who were unaware of the sexual orientation of the subjects taking the test) to evaluate the results; these experts were unable spot any differences between responses of homosexuals and heterosexuals. Studies such as these were used to advocate declassification of homosexuality from the list of mental disorders in the DSM (Bayer 1981). This idea, that political and ideological positions affect conceptualization and results of research studies, is reflected also in the review of studies related to conversion/reparative treatments for homosexuality. Haldeman (1994) reviews a range of research studies aimed at conversion of homosexuality and raises several methodological questions that highlight the fact that the researchers are influenced by their belief that homosexuality is a pathology that needs cure. Some of the studies reviewed by Haldeman use different psychological and even religion-based methods to cure homosexuality and claim a moderate to high success rate of these methods in curing homosexuality. Haldeman’s review of these studies points to several methodological limitations that compromise the claims of cure made by these studies. These include lack of clear and inclusive definitions of sexual orientation—unless that which will be changed is clearly defined, what has changed cannot be measured. Often sexual orientation is narrowly defined in these studies as only sexual behaviours and that too without clarity on frequency, persistence, duration; as a result individuals with predominantly homosexual behaviours or fantasies are clubbed with bisexuals, as also individuals having occasional same-sex behaviours and dominantly heterosexual fantasies, and so on. Outcomes in these studies have often included subjective impressions of the therapists (who are highly motivated and invested in seeing their treatment methods work) and self-report of participants (highly susceptible to social demands). Criteria to measure success are often unclear: does success mean abstaining from homosexual behaviours and staying celibate? Does it include expansion of sexual repertoire to include heterosexual behaviours, while same-sex behaviours continue? Does it mean fulfilling of social obligations such as marriage or having a child, does it include complete substitution of homosexual acts and fantasies with heterosexual ones? Often these studies have been conducted with clinical samples and follow-up data after termination of treatment are unavailable.
In the examples of studies that I cite here, all the studies were conceptualized within a positivist paradigm and collected data using quantitative measurements. However, even with their claims of neutrality, lack of bias and objectivity, these studies were motivated in certain core beliefs—those which considered homosexuality to be unnatural, pathological, and sinful, and those that considered homosexuality to be a normal, natural aspect of human sexuality. Thus the claim of positivist research to objective, universal (acontextual) evidence needs to be questioned in favour of a more situated and subjective knowledge that is shaped by psychic forces and interpersonal contexts as much as by socio-political, cultural context.
The idea of evidence gathering to arrive at an ‘objective truth’—detached, impersonal, observable knowledge that exists independently/separately of us—has been challenged within the qualitative paradigms of research. These emphasize subjectivity, experience, narrative of the researched about their lived experiences and their meaning making processes and, most importantly, ‘context’ in the process of knowing. The situated nature of the researcher, the researched, and therefore, the knowledge that is viewed as co-created by them, is at the essence of qualitative research frameworks (Neuman 2002; Harding 1987). Also, reflexivity of the researcher regarding their own context, location, and motivation for the study is a feature of some kinds of qualitative studies (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2009). This study too is conceptualized and situated within my own location as a queer feminist activist and a mental health professional/activist. I will be discussing this more extensively in a later section on researcher location.
2.2 The Life Course Theory and Critical Psychosocial Approach in the Study of Growing Up Gay/Lesbian
Growth and development of human behaviour has been studied with two main approaches, prior to the development of the life course approach/theory. One is primarily the approach followed by developmental psychology: studying individual lives using a longitudinal/temporal framework, and by understanding different life cycle stages throughout the life span of an individual. The second is the social exchange approach that was used to study the effects of social structures on individual lives (Giele and Elder 1998). Life course theory, more commonly termed the life course perspective, however, uses a multidisciplinary paradigm for the study of people’s lives, structural contexts, and social change (Elder et al. 2003). Life course theory adopts a social constructionist perspective to the study of human lives. It does not view life course as something that is ‘there’, a flow of personal experience through time that needs to be studied; instead it views life course as an interactional achievement, a social form that people themselves interpretively produce and use to make sense of their everyday lives (Holstein and Gubrium 2000).
Life course theory has four distinct principles: (i) time and place, (ii) life-span development, (iii) agency, and (iv) linked lives. The principle of time and place, which implies a socio-historical dimension to events, is significant in the context of sexuality studies as notions of ‘normative’, ‘moral’, ‘appropriate/acceptable’ forms of sexual behaviors and identities are produced and are responsive to context, time, and place. Cohler and Hammack (2007) state that questions of development and normality cannot be considered independently of time and space. In fact, societal transformations fundamentally alter the life course of gay and lesbian individuals. Hence, historical time and context, and the prevalent discourse of sexuality, morality, and normality, become inevitable in the study of gay, lesbian life experiences. In the present study, for instance, most participants were growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. This time period and space with its political, economic, and social features, is significant in shaping the experiences of participants as they were growing up and discovering their sexuality. For instance, the 1980s and early 1990s was a time of pre-liberalization or rather beginning of liberalization reforms in India, when there was no internet yet, there were no mobile phones/smart phones, no social media; there were primarily two national television channels; private broadcasters and cable television only began to appear in the 1990s in the urban centres of India. This was also the time when HIV/AIDS work had just begun in the country. The sexual and reproductive health rights discourse, which has largely informed discussions on sexuality and rights within civil society organizations, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and academia, had not yet been heard of. In this sense, the idea of sexual rights had not yet been articulated in state policy. It was in this historical context that most of the study participants were growing up and making sense of their sexuality. I will further discuss this time frame of the 1980s and 1990s, specifically in the context of the cities of Bombay and Pune, where I conducted the study, in a later section.
The emphasis on historical time and context in life course perspective has also developed in response to recognition of generation and cohort effect (Elder 1975). Hammack (2005) states that, in an attempt to account for historical time in the development experiences of gay men and lesbian women in America, life course theorists have identified cohorts such as pre-war (World War II), post-war, post-stonewall, AIDS, post-AIDS and so on. Hammack (2005, 276) states: “Pre-War gay life was characterized by massive secrecy, furtive sex, and the inevitability of marriage and reproduction. The post-war urban culture, increasingly populated by hordes of soldiers who had engaged in homosexual behaviour, witnessed the birth of urban gay communities, with more gay men choosing to live a nonheterosexual lifestyle… The Stonewall Inn riots of 1969 provided significant maturation and momentum to the Gay Civil Rights Movement…” In the Indian context too, certain milestones (as discussed in Chap. 1) such as the decriminalization of homosexuality in 2009, re-criminalization in 2013, or HIV-AIDS work from the 1990s and national attention to the situation of gay men, MSM, hijras, and trans women in this context, could be seen as forming a similar time and space context to understand growing-up experiences of gay/lesbian individuals. Being a gay teenager in India in the decade of 2000, or the current decade from 2010 onwards, would be distinctly different from growing up in the 1980s and 1990s.
Another aspect of ‘time’, as referred to in life course theory, is that of the temporal pattern of events and timing of life transitions. The timing of life transitions, has long-term impacts, through effects on subsequent transitions. In the context of this study, for several participants, a sense of being different predated the emergence of sexuality and puberty and, thus, many of them experienced a sense of isolation, a sense of ‘not fitting in’ and therefore, alienation, from an early age. This implies that LG children, who were gender transgressive from early childhood, much before the emergence of their sexuality, possibly faced greater challenges in growing up. The life course perspective also recognizes continuity and linkages between different life stages, such as childhood and adolescent experiences, and the impact of these on later experiences in adulthood. This is one of the core ideas of this book, that the gender transgressions of childhood, and corrective responses that these receive, are fundamentally connected, in an affective, cognitive, and experiential manner, with sexual explorations and making sense of the same during adolescence, and later decisions of disclosure/non-disclosure, as well as self-categorization as a queer person, and development of collective identities. Furthermore, as discussed in chapter one, the idea of life transitions, life stages, developmental milestones, and the timing of the same, have largely been conceptualized within a heterosexual life framework, and these do not apply in a direct or a similar way in the non-normative life schedules of many queer persons.
The second principle of life course theory is that of life-span development, which includes studying the progressive series of changes and maturational processes that occur among humans throughout the life span and are influenced by both genetic endowments as well as environmental phenomena. The study of life span includes the study of different life stages such as childhood, adolescence, adulthood, each with its developmental tasks and milestones, and continuity throughout life span i.e. every new life experience is shaped and mediated by earlier experiences and attached meanings. Applying the life span development approach to studying ‘growing-up’ experiences of gay and lesbian persons implies that sexuality is viewed to be a significant context that affects the childhood, adolescence, and life course of an individual with same-sex desires. The underlying assumption is that being attracted to individuals of the same-sex can have an impact on all aspects of living across the lifespan. In the current research, this perspective is used to study the processes, milestones, and challenges faced by young gay and lesbian individuals in their childhood years, adolescence, and young adulthood, within families, schools/colleges, peer cultures, and work spaces. The life course perspective also draws on traditional theories of developmental psychology, which look at the events that typically occur in people’s lives during different stages. The life course perspective however differs from these psychological theories in one very important way. Developmental psychology looks for universal, predictable events and pathways, but the life course perspective calls attention to how historical time, social location, and culture affect the individual experience of each life stage (Hutchison 2011). In this sense the life course perspective, ‘acknowledges the dialectical process between internal and external, biology and culture, person and society’ (Hammack 2005, 269)
Agency is based on the assumption that humans are not passive recipients of a predetermined life course but make decisions that determine the shape of their lives (Hitlin and Elder 2007). Life course theory assumes that reality is co-created through interactional and interpretative processes and practice; that individuals construct their own life course through choices and actions they take within opportunities and constraints placed on them by social structures. Thus, the nature of reality itself is such that it is discursively established by participants in the discourse (Holstein and Gubrium 2000). In studying the processes of ‘growing up’ gay or lesbian, I acknowledge that every individual participant has actively interpreted, impacted and engaged with their experiences of growing up years to develop a narrative of these years; of things happening within themselves as well as outside of them. The ways in which participants in this study have worked through invisibility, silences, and hostility around same-sex sexuality, to find affirmative spaces, and develop and consolidate their sexual identity, are examples of the individual agency of participants that I discuss throughout this book.
The core life course principle is of ‘linked lives’; the perspective that lives are lived interdependently and reflect socio-historical influences (Marshall and Mueller 2003). This principle of linked lives implies both the influence of links/relationships between people as well as that between people and their communities and the wider world (Hutchison 2011). The development of a sense of identity as a sexual being is not a phenomenon that occurs in isolation; rather, it is mediated by several social linkages. It is social structures that dictate the norms of sexuality and gender and are constituted by practice of the same. Similarly, the practice of normative gender or sexuality expressed in, for instance, rules about marriage in a given society—Who marries whom? What is the gender, caste, class, age of the two parties entering into a marriage?—cannot float free, but are responsive to and constrained by the circumstances, which those social structures constitute (Connell 1987). Thus, personal life and collective social arrangements are linked in a fundamental and constitutive way and, hence, to study one without attention to the other would provide us with only a partial picture. Moreover, in the context of marginalized sexualities, the role of interconnectedness with others like oneself, and self-categorization in development and assertion of identity is vital.
In addition to a life course perspective that forms the methodological base for this study, I also use a critical psychosocial approach as an analytical framework that brings together the personal and the collective/social to understand growing up gay in a heterosexually constructed world. In describing a critical psychosocial approach to studying growing up gay, I rely substantially on the work of Frosh (2003) in the paper titled, ‘Psychosocial Studies and Psychology: Is a Critical Approach Emerging?’ Frosh argues in this paper that, while the term has been used extensively in social psychology and I suggest a similar usage in social work, ‘psychosocial’ is often used in a way that takes the ‘individual’ for granted, and seeks to understand ways in which this individual interacts with, interprets, and makes meaning of the ‘social’. On the other hand, a similar essentialist description of the social or of the group may take place without attention to subjectivities. Thus while using psychosocial, the separateness, and dichotomy between the individual/psyche and the social is often maintained. Frosh suggests the need to examine psychosocial “as a seamless entity, as a space in which notions which are conventionally distinguished—‘individual’ and ‘society’, are instead thought of together, as intimately connected or possibly even the same thing” (2003, 3). The nature of the self/subject from a psychosocial perspective is then both as an agent and actor, and also subject of and subjected to external forces and social structures of class, caste, gender, religion, ethnicity, and so on. Frosh states, “The important point is that the subject is not a pre-given entity, nor something to be found through searching; it is rather a site, in which there are criss-crossing lines of force, and out of which that precious feature of human existence, subjectivity, emerges” (2003, 6). It is thus a challenge, while employing a psychosocial perspective, to be attentive to the social as constructing the personal and the subject not being independent of sociality, but without losing sight or rather holding onto the ‘experience’ of the personal.
One of the questions that arises then is that if a subject is always socially embedded and constructed then is there such a thing as a ‘subject’ that is more than the social conditions that produce it? In response, Frosh describes Judith Butler’s formulation of the agential subject as, “… subjects are constructed by and in power… But this does not mean that subjects have no agency; rather, their agentic status is what they are produced with, and it enables them to take hold of power and use it…” (2003, 10).
In this book, the growing up gay person that I seek to understand and study is constituted and responsive to social and relational forces, while being an active, meaning making, negotiating, coping subject. This psychic narrative of growing up is simultaneously shaped by socio-cultural and personal, relational influences.
As mentioned earlier, ‘psychosocial’ is often used in literature to mean a study of social adjustment or a study of social influences on individual behaviours or a study of interpersonal relations (Frosh 2003). However, when I use the term psychosocial in this book, I use it to refer to a coming together of internal/intrapsychic processes and social forces that are in a constant dialogue, negotiation and process of shaping each other. It is in this sense that I employ a critical psychosocial perspective in this study.
2.3 Contexts of the Study
The current study is conceptualized within a qualitative research paradigm and is informed by a critical psychosocial approach and a life course framework. The study is exploratory in nature, since there is sparse literature on growing up experiences of gay and lesbian individuals in India. It seeks to explore experiences of growing up through childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, of lesbian and gay youth within their social and institutional contexts of family, marriage, law, medicine, media, educational institutions, peers, and neighbourhoods.
While the study seeks to understand growing up experiences, it does so retrospectively by conducting in-depth interviews, wherein the study participants are asked to recall their experiences of childhood and their growing up years. This study has been conducted in the cities of Mumbai and Pune and participants were contacted using a snowball method. The process of the interview and seeking participants is described in a later section. Here, I only wish to note that the limitations or scope of knowledge as applied to qualitative, exploratory, retrospective studies—such as claiming partial and contextual knowledge and not claiming generalizability of knowledge, recall and recency effect in retrospective narrativization, and so on—apply to this study too.
Locating the Researcher
Frank (1979) suggests that gathering life histories is a collaborative project involving the consciousness of the investigator as well as the research subject. In fact, in the qualitative research tradition, most researchers acknowledge the role of their own professional training and conceptual orientation, as also their personal skills and resources for understanding phenomena and experience (Honigmann et al. 1976). Others such as Devereux (1967) have suggested that eliminating the subjectivity of the researcher in behavioural and social sciences is neither desirable nor possible, and that even if one were to claim objectivity in the development of tools/methods of collecting data, at the interpretative stages, the researcher’s perspective is bound to appear. Devereux (1967) suggests that, in order to maintain research rigor, it would be advisable to knowingly acknowledge and reflect on researcher subjectivity, instead of not being consciously aware of it.
A large part of my ‘self’ and ‘identity’ that I bring to this study is that of a mental health professional and activist. I have been trained both within the clinical paradigm/s of psychopathology/mental illness, counselling/psychotherapy as well as within the broader framework of social justice and rights and, specifically, advocating for rights of persons with psychosocial disabilities. I was able to put this training into practice during my work within a mental health advocacy and service organization in Pune. Thus, what I bring to this study is a critical lens to mental health knowledge and its practice/s, as well as experience of therapeutic work with persons in distress. My world view and practice as a therapist has been strongly influenced by ideas from attachment-based therapeutic work, self-psychology, and a developmental lens—seeing linkages between experiences of growing up years and adult emotional life and helping adult clients work through traumatic experiences of early life. Thus, in my practice with adult gay men, lesbian women, a few trans women, and persons with intersex variations, I have seen that childhood experiences of isolation and alienation from family and significant others form significant themes in our adult lives. Yet, we know so little about these growing up experiences in lives of individuals with non-normative sexual and gender expressions. Apart from counselling work with LGBT clients, I have worked as a trainer and researcher with gay men, MSM, and kothis, and bring these experiences too. I have been in long-term therapy myself with a psychiatrist-therapist trained in object-relations therapy. This fairly long journey of working through early conflicts, the angst of growing up as a queer person myself, and piecing together these multiple narratives of my personal, professional, and political life, are inseparable from the process of writing about growing up gay.
The other perspective I bring to this study is a more recently acquired queer feminist activist identity. I have been a member of a queer feminist collective in Bombay since 2011. This position has given me exposure to, and helped me to engage closely with, LGBTQ movement/s within the country and collective organizing for campaigns. Being a member of an LBT collective makes me an insider to some parts (groups and individuals with feminist political leanings) of the LGBTQ community in Bombay.
Finally, I have grown up in Bombay and lived and worked in Pune for over seven years. The primary reason for choosing these two cities as sites for gathering data is my familiarity with these cities, and with groups and NGOs working here.
This book is an outcome of a decade-long engagement with NGOs, collectives, and individuals from within the LGBTQ communities that I was involved with in varied capacities since 2005. Initially, I worked on LGBTQ mental health concerns as a counsellor and a trainer in Pune and later, under a research fellowship, conducted a study on mental health concerns of sexual minorities and their experiences of mental health services. I have tried to consolidate some of these learnings during my doctoral studies in the last five to six years, during which time I also became member of an LBT collective in Bombay.
Locating the Researched
The study was carried out in the cities of Mumbai and Pune. Both these cities, particularly Mumbai (earlier Bombay), have had a long history of LGBTQ organizing. Humjinsi, a resource book on Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Rights in India, lists a date line to document some of the major events/actions in the history of lesbian/gay organizing in India (Fernandez 1999). Some of the significant moments in this date line as pertaining to the city of Bombay include: staging of a Marathi Play, Mitrachi Goshta by Vijay Tendulkar in 1981 in Bombay and Thane focusing on the inner conflict of a woman who realizes she is lesbian; in February 1986, Savy magazine publishes a coming-out interview of Ashok Row Kavi, a first for the Indian media; in 1990, Bombay Dost, India’s first gay and lesbian magazine makes a debut; in 1993, Udaan, a group of working class gay men is formed in Bombay; in 1994, the Humsafar Trust, India’s first gay NGO, is registered in Bombay; in 1995, Stree Sangam, a lesbian and bisexual women’s group is formed in Bombay and they start a zine, ‘Scripts’ in 1998 to talk about queer women’s lives. In addition, since the mid-1990s in Bombay and early 2000s in Pune, several NGOs and community based organizations working with MSM, gay men, and transgender persons (TGs), have been established to carry out HIV related work. Apart from HIV/AIDS awareness, prevention, testing and treatment work, most of these organizations have been involved with running drop-in centres and support groups to create safe spaces for sexual minorities. They have also been involved with rights-based advocacy work to assert rights of sexual and gender minorities. Several autonomous groups that carry out advocacy, political/collective action as well as work to create safe spaces for socialization, partying, and meeting up with other gay and lesbian persons, have been coming up since 2000 in both cities; more so in Bombay. Some of these organize regular social events and parties for LGBT people to meet. There have been a series of queer-themed business ventures that have come up in Mumbai city including a queer-themed store and a publishing house. In addition, queer film festivals are an annual feature in Bombay and there have been several queer-themed film screenings in Pune too. The older queer-themed magazines such as Bombay Dost, started in 1990, and Scripts, started in 1998, have been running for years, and many new publications—including queer anthologies, and books on queer erotica—have appeared in the last couple of years.
While there are collectives and NGOs in Mumbai that focus on the lives and issues of lesbian, bisexual women and trans persons (LBT), there are no such organized collectives or groups in Pune for LBT persons. Olava (Organized Lesbian Alliance for Visibility and Action) was a group that was formed in Pune in the year 2000, which shut down later in two to three years (Dave 2012). However NGOs working with gay men, MSM, trans women, and hijras, do exist in Pune city and there also exist a few groups that organize social events, parties, and film festivals for LGBT persons.
Thus, there is a vibrant queer social and political life in both Mumbai and Pune. The presence of these queer spaces mentioned above in both the cities made it possible for me to access gay and lesbian participants for this study.
The average age of participants in this study was thirty-three years, and interviews were conducted with them in two phases, 2007–08, and 2011–13. Thus, most of the participants were growing up in the late 1980s and 1990s in the cities of Mumbai and Pune and, while the date line I mention above does indicate a few instances of LGBT organizing and visibility, my interview narratives do suggest a great deal of isolation and invisibility initially, until the participants got in touch with the queer communities in their cities through reading a newspaper article, an online chat, or through a helpline.
A total of forty participants were interviewed for the study, of these twenty-five self-identified as gay and fifteen self-identified as lesbian. A total of fifteen participants were from Pune and twenty-five were from Mumbai. The lower number of participants from Pune is due to fewer spaces to meet potential participants from the community (as compared to Mumbai) and limited weekend access, since I was living in Mumbai for part of the duration of the study. Also, in general, in both cities, meeting gay men was much easier as there were many more NGOs and groups working with them and this increased access. Access was also linked with my own location; during this time period, I was mostly engaged with NGOs working with gay men, MSM, and kothis, as a mental health professional and trainer. With respect to lesbian women, there were no groups in Pune that worked on issues of lesbian women (in 2007–08 and 2010, when I was interviewing participants in Pune), after the closure of OLAVA in 2002–03, and in Bombay, while there were groups, my access to these groups was limited at the time of conducting interviews. Hence, the lower numbers of lesbian women participants in this study.
As noted, the average age of the participants was thirty-three years, with the youngest participant being twenty-four years old and the oldest one being forty-five. A total of four participants had studied up to 12th Standard and twenty-three were graduates, while thirteen had completed some kind of postgraduate degree in subjects such as English literature, Social Work, Computer Science, Business Administration, Medicine, Law and so on. Eighteen of them were employed as professionals in various institutions such as banks, corporate businesses, hospitals, call centres, and teaching institutions. Interestingly, eleven of them were working in NGOs. All of these were NGOs working on LGBT rights, HIV, or women’s empowerment. This higher number is partly because NGOs were a contact point for me to seek potential participants and partly because some of them said that their queer identity was central to who they saw themselves to be currently, and hence had chosen to work in the area of empowerment of women and LGBT persons.
Among the forty participants, nine were from a lower socio-economic strata (self-reported and as understood in terms of income, occupation, and type of housing), thirteen from the middle socio-economic strata, and eighteen from the upper socio-economic group (self-reported and as understood in terms of individual and family income, type of housing, ownership of assets). In case of two participants, their parents belonged to the lower socio-economic strata and they have moved upward on the socio-economic ladder and hence are counted as belonging to the middle socio-economic strata. However, they grew up in conditions of considerable deprivation. In terms of living arrangements, ten were living independently, twenty-four with family, and six were living with their partners. All six persons living with partners were lesbian women. Of these six, I had interviewed four; two couples and two others whose partners were not part of the study. Among the ten participants living independently, many had weekend or occasional living together arrangements with their partners. Of these ten participants, four were women and six were men. This implies that of the fifteen lesbian women who participated in the study, ten were living with partners or independently, and only five were living with family. Among these five, one participant was living with her daughters after separation from her husband, and another one, who was in a heterosexual marriage, was living with her husband and son. Only three of the lesbian participants were living with their natal families and of these two were not in remunerative employment at the time of the interview. That lesbian women need to separate from families or move out of family homes under the ‘cited reasons’ of education or job opportunities in order to be able to live out their lives is explored in greater detail in later chapters. Living independent of family is also an indicator of class and, while there were many gay men in the study who belonged to upper class backgrounds and were professionals with sound income, not many of them were living independently. This trend is discussed later in analysis and possible explanations are discussed.
Of the forty study participants, thirty-five were unmarried, while five were married at some point in their lives. Of these five, two were women and three were men. At the time of the interview, one man and one woman had divorced and separated respectively, while three others continued to be married. Among the forty participants, most grew up in the cities of Mumbai or Pune, except seven, who grew up elsewhere and were currently living in these cities for educational or occupational reasons. Of these seven participants, some grew up in various places in India: in Nasik; in a village in Vidharbha; in a small town in Rajasthan; moved between several cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi. Two participants grew up in other countries; one a Middle Eastern country and one an African country. There were three participants who were Muslim; one, both of whose parents were Muslim and two with one Muslim parent each. There were three participants who were Dalit and Buddhist, and three were Christians. All the others were Hindu.
Twenty-five participants were currently living in Mumbai and fifteen in Pune. A few grew up in places other than Mumbai and Pune. Growing up experiences for LG persons in Mumbai and Pune are comparable on several counts. Experiences within family and school settings, and in community environments such as the chawls in Mumbai and the vadas in Pune, were similar. Differences emerged primarily in terms of access to the LGBTQ community. Many of the participants from Pune, both men and women, talked about accessing community first, or, rather, primarily, in Mumbai. This was due to a more visible queer presence in Mumbai as compared to Pune.
The Interview
… the guiding principle for [life histories] could be that all autobiographical memory is true: it is up to the interpreter to discover in which sense, where, and for what purpose.
In this study, an interview guide was used, which served as a broad guideline to steer the conversation. Participants were encouraged to talk about their life experiences along a timeline, starting from some of their earliest childhood memories to the current time. The time line thus became a tool on which conversations about life events, transitions and life trajectories could be pegged. Participants were free to move back and forth on the timeline and for some the narratives began from the present time and went back into childhood and for some the conversation began at some point in the middle which the participant saw as a significant moment in their narrative. Some others started with their childhood and earliest memories. Thus, participants did a free-flow style of storytelling, which was recorded. Invariably, life stories included conversations about complex, multiple interjecting trajectories. These were explored using probing follow-up questions, while intermittently referring to the interview guide.
Since participants were asked to recollect events and experiences, and the meanings of the same, right from their childhood, the study can be said to be using a retrospective design, and limitations of such a design apply to this study too. Recollection of events, talking from memory, or what may be referred to as constructing a life narrative, in the present is bound to be mediated by current and other intermediate experiences, one’s current world view/ideology, language, politics, and so on. In this sense, it would not be possible to observe or know with precision the exact event/s that occurred at a particular point of time in the life story, say for instance in class IV, in school, when the person was nine years old in the year 1985. However, the narrative about that event/s as constructed by the person would be accessible. Moreover, this narrative would not be seen as a single instance, but would be viewed in light of the person’s overall life narrative, which in turn would be contextualized. Thus, the interview process in this study was not about evidence gathering or truth finding, but instead about close listening, curiosity, establishing a relationship with the participants, empathy, humour, and solidarity.
Interviews were undertaken in two phases, including a pilot phase; the first one in 2007–08 and the second over a period of almost two years, between 2011 and 2013. Due to the paucity of time, several interviews were conducted over a single sitting lasting for an average of two to three hours with breaks. Some were conducted over two sessions. Interviews were conducted in participants’ homes, coffee shops, NGO drop-in centres, and even public gardens, in both cities. All the interviews were audio recorded after seeking consent from participants and were later transcribed. Data transcripts were read and re-read, and coding was done using a computer package (MAXQDA 11). Themes that emerged from the codes were used to carry out a thematic analysis of the data that is presented as four chapters in this book.
The snowball method that is widely used in qualitative research studies, particularly while researching stigmatized communities that may often be invisibilized/ hidden due to fear of stigma and discrimination, and that are seen as difficult to reach (Heckathorn 1997), was used to contact potential participants. I spread the word around about the study among friends from within the queer community and on social networking sites and NGO spaces. After getting the first contacts through these multiple points, I conducted their interviews and that of those referred by them. To ensure diversity in the background of participants, I contacted NGOs, social/party spaces, and activist groups in both cities. Also, a few of my ex-clients, who had sought counselling services from me earlier from within the LG community in Pune, served as contact points. Some of the participants that were contacted through NGO spaces in Bombay city had been interviewed before for other kinds of research projects in the area of sexual health. However, most of the participants were being interviewed for a qualitative study with a life course perspective for the first time.
Use of Narrative Data
In this book, narrative data has been used in two ways. One use is that of the first person narrative data that has been taken from the interviews with the study participants. As mentioned above, the process of using this data has been as follows: transcription of the entire interview as well as any follow-up interviews; coding and re-coding of transcripts as per emerging themes; coded segments or participant quotes illustrative of each theme collated together. Finally, in the writing of each theme, the original words of the participants have been retained to explain each theme emerging from the participant data. Each of these quotes has been further qualified with details of the participant/speaker such as age, gender, sexual identity, and location.
The second use of narrative data is the one in the prelude section of each of the following chapters. Chapters three, four, five and six start with a section titled ‘Prelude’. The narratives that are used here are illustrative of the themes and the discussion that will be carried forward in the chapter. In this sense, these narratives are a prelude, an introduction in a first person narrative format, to what lies ahead in the chapter. These introductory narratives serve as a way to draw the reader into the lived experience of the participants without any interruptions or analysis. These narratives, while written in the form of a first person story, are not gathered from one particular study participant. They are, at times, reflective of common/shared experiences of study participants; at times, they refer to informal conversations with me as a co-activist, friend, or a chat among a group of friends; sharing at a support group meeting or meeting of a collective; my own personal experiences; and so on. As a result, these prelude narratives do not end with demographic details of a specific participant or their location.
2.4 Ethical Concerns in Doing Research with Sexual Minority Groups
Consent from the research participants was the starting point for the data collection phase of this study. Most participants read about the study or were told about the same by their friends from within the queer community. In the few instances where I contacted the staff of an NGO, participants heard about the study from them. Participation was entirely voluntary. In the case of two of the research participants, they had sought services from a counselling centre in Pune where I had worked earlier. They heard about the study and expressed interest in participating. Thus, while my colleagues and I had provided direct services to them at some point, it was ensured that they did not feel the pressure or burden to participate in the study. Moreover, they had stopped seeking services at this centre, at the time they decided to participate in the interview.
In addition to seeking consent, participants knew that there were no direct benefits they would receive by participating in the study. The intention of ‘no harm’ and yet the possibility of distress, on recounting some traumatic material from the growing-up years, was discussed with the participants. Participants were promised counselling referral services in case they needed it. They were also assured that I would negotiate fees for these services, if they were not in a position to pay for the same. Some of the participants were already plugged into support networks in the community and, in this sense, did have access to other safe spaces, apart from the clinical/therapeutic space.
While it is important to acknowledge that a study like this can evoke distressing memories, the interview process itself was constructed in a manner that ensured a safe, engaging, space for the research participants. There were disclosures about sexual abuse in childhood, worries about HIV status, suicide attempts, non-disclosure of same-sex desires to spouses, and discussion of several relationship stressors with me. Some of the participants, especially those who were isolated, made requests for being introduced to potential dating, sex partners. All of these issues were discussed over a period of time, where information resources such as e-lists of the LGBTQ community, books, films, party and social spaces for LGBTQ, were shared with the participants. Often, there were no follow-up actions that the participants expected, but just having a conversation, a few laughs, and answering a few questions pertaining to my own life, seemed to help. These conversations happened during interviews as well as later, over phone calls and sometimes e-mail. One of the participants did ask for and was provided a contact of a counsellor in Bombay. This participant shared that she wanted to seek counselling services for a while but was always apprehensive. However, after the interview, and after hearing about my work in the mental health sector, she felt a level of trust and confidence to seek professional help.
Given that the ‘out’ gay and lesbian communities in Mumbai and Pune are not too large and often the same people meet each other at a gay party, a book launch, a pride march, a protest meet, a dating site, confidentiality becomes a significant ethical concern. For instance, I would realize while conducting an interview or during data collection that, though I had contacted two persons through two unconnected sources/contact, people in the study knew each other or had dated each other at some point in the past. Thus, while the interview followed an informal conversational style, I ensured that I never divulged any details of my research participants to any of the other participants. However, while personal details were kept confidential, information about other resources, which is valuable and scarce in a heterosexist world, was shared freely (wherever relevant) with all participants. For instance, one of the participants had talked about shops where she could easily buy large size men’s shirts, which she likes to use without facing too much of discomfort or awkward reactions from the staff. A similar issue came up with another participant, and this information about the shop with friendly staff was anonymously shared with the person. Another example would be while talking about safe public spaces to hangout as a queer couple, participants discussed their experiences with various parks and restaurants, and this information was shared with other participants if conversations about safe public spaces came up during interviews. In addition to not divulging information about participants, all the identifying markers of all participants such as names, place/area of residence, affiliations with NGOs, groups, and so on are masked.
Self-disclosure and boundaries with study participants is another issue that I would like to discuss here. As a feminist researcher and practitioner, I firmly believe in acknowledging and working to reduce the power imbalance in a research as well as a therapeutic relationship. One of the ways to do this is to deconstruct the expert stance of the researcher and conduct the study as a collaborative process. Another related one would be to not hide one’s real self and vulnerabilities behind an expert/researcher garb. I did struggle with the latter in a few instances. While a feminist orientation in therapeutic work and political engagement with mental health advocacy equipped me with the politics and self-reflexivity to deconstruct the expert position, my own struggles with my sexuality, relationships, non-engagement with queer political spaces till much later, made transparency and appropriate, rather, necessary self-disclosure (during the interview process) a challenge for me at times. As I discuss in chapter four, decision about disclosure or non-disclosure about one’s sexuality is a complicated one. It has to do with elements of internalized homonegativity and internal conflict, as much as with absence of support networks, perception of threat, violence, and discrimination.
This study is an outcome of a decade-long engagement with LGBTQ communities that I first approached as an ‘expert-outsider’ and later as an insider, and this has meant a considerable shift in my stance. I therefore need to acknowledge that, based on my location today as a queer feminist activist and learnings that come thereof, I would have done some parts of this study differently, particularly with regard to participation of the study participants in the process of analysis and writing. In that sense, while this is a study within the qualitative framework and the interview narratives are a product of a collaborative process, the analysis and writing has been mostly done by me. In addition to my privileges of education, caste, class, religion, I have had the privilege of the researcher of analysing, interpreting, and representing the stories shared by my study participants, based on my understanding and the analytical lens that I employ. These questions of power imbalance in production of knowledge remain, though I have tried to be aware of the same, both in the process of the interview and in the analysis and writing of the life stories shared by the participants.
To summarize, using a life course and a critical psychosocial perspective, through in-depth interviews with forty self-identified gay and lesbian study participants from the cities of Mumbai and Pune, I describe, in the following chapters, experiences of childhood and adolescence of lesbian and gay individuals, their process of consolidating their sexual identities, decisions regarding disclosure of the same, their same-sex adult romantic relationships, and engagement with the queer community/s.